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The Customer
The customer is a
start-up firm based in California. The customer wanted
to conceptualize and architect a global contact management
and sales automation system using XML RPC web-services-based
client server protocol. This was the latest area of
the technology research and the customer wanted a technology
focused organization to prototype and evolve the architecture
around it.
The Challenge
• The main
challenge for the project was to work with the evolving
technologies such as phpGroupWare. At that time, there
were a lot of problems in the 0.9.002 version which
the Hanu Software team ended up fixing themselves. In
addition, the server did not support some of the features
that the customer wanted to use in their product. As
a result, the Hanu Software team enhanced the PhpGroupWare
server.
The other
important objectives to be met were as follows:
• Conceptualize
and evolve an XML RPC based client server model with
the client residing on the Windows box and the server
on the Linux box
• Do the ‘build vs. buy’ analysis
for the tools to enable the architecture
• Develop a professional GUI on windows box
• Suggest the future development architecture
for the product
• Cost Effective Product Development
The Solution
• Hanu Software
used the ‘Dedicated Resource Model’ for
this project (i.e. team members worked exclusively on
the customer’s project, and that way the customer
was able to develop confidence and a stable relationship
with the team).
• Developing the Prototype: Hanu Software developed
a prototype to verify the proposed architecture. For
the prototype, one ‘get’ and one ‘update’
call was implemented using the ASP.NET client and phpGroupWare
server. For implementing the data grid in the user interface,
the team looked at two products – MS DataGrid
and InterSoft’s WebGrid. The team did a detailed
comparison of these two products and finally decided
to go with WebGrid as it supported features such as
multi-column sort.
• Hanu Software implemented the XML RPC based
web services architecture for the project: .NET based
GUI layer and PHP based phpGroupWare server running
on Linux box. The MySQL was used as a DB server internally
by the phpGroupWare server.
Application
Development: Hanu Software became responsible
for developing the application. The detailed design
and development was done with the project team, which
consisted of –a Project Manager, a Technical Lead,
a QA Lead and 4 Java developers. While developers were
writing the code, the QA Lead prepared the System Test
Cases. The System Test Cases were used to verify that
all the requirements had been coded properly.
System Test: The system test was conducted
at Hanu Software’s offsite facility in NJ followed
by the onsite customer acceptance test.
Deployment Support: The application
was developed using the TomCAT application server and
the MySQL database server. However the deployment was
done on WebSphere and Oracle. During the deployment,
the Hanu Software team worked side by side with the
customer’s deployment team.
Stress Test: Once the acceptance test
was done, the customer proceeded to the Stress Test.
Hanu Software supported the stress test through its
valuable resources.
Business Gains
The customer is gaining
a lot with the new web-based presentation system, as
it will increase sales of its eProducts and the visibility
of higher education in the E-marketplace. The end-users
of the site, such as sales representatives and other
public users, feel much more comfortable using the new
system and can explore many more tours than before because
of the new easy-to-use, powerful creation tool that
allows the author to create new tours more efficiently.
Architecture
Diagram:
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